SEX: A BARGAINING CHIP? By OLAWALE OBADEYI

To war strategists, victory over the enemy may be earned by any means whatsoever. Same goes for wily and hard-nosed business men. They leave nothing to chance. Sometimes, they are close to employing Machiavellian means in plying their trade. It will also not be out of place to draw a parallel between this cold, calculating world and that of politicians. In their lexicon, there is simply no free lunch. It is a world in which one thing is given to get another.
This, perhaps, explains why a careful and reasonable person will instantly see through a Greek gift. Walking into a trap with one’s eyes wide open can have grave consequences. Mercifully, however, once you can identify your foe, sheer common sense will teach you to give any such individual a wide berth.
But marriage is a totally different ball game. From the moment a man and a woman are conjoined, either in Church or through a ceremony the Moslems call Nikkai, it is to be taken for granted that man and wife will not only be one, they must also be loyal, each to each. Indeed, they must learn to live together in unconditional and selfless love.
At all the weddings that I have attended, the officiating clerics, customarily, enjoined the couple to be faithful, forsake other men and women and above all else, yield to each other completely in mind, body and soul. Little wonder most men briskly metamorphose as soon as they get married. Indeed, the transition is, usually, close to
magical. The man, who, ordinarily, would spend hours in company of his friends, after work, suddenly sets a greater store by his new home. He would rather hurry back into his wife’s waiting arms than do otherwise. In his better-half he has found not only his best friend, but also a worthy soul mate.
For good measure, you should see the look on the faces of newly-married men whose wives are expectant mothers. They dote on, talk, eat, drink and live their wives. Whatever worries their women becomes their own bother. Who blames them? After all, a man’s heart, naturally, should be where his treasure is. No question. But to expect that marriage will always be akin to Paradise is to be unrealistic and naïve. This may be one of the reasons why most parents, in counseling their children, on their wedding day, harp on the truism that marriage is a school - a place of rigorous and endless learning. How very much so! To do well in this school, Mr. and Mrs., we are always told, must rise above pettiness and seek solutions to problems only within the home and not outside its walls. But what happens?
Some of the hiccups most marriages have - and this is no exaggeration - are often traceable to the unhelpful counsel of friends, some of whom are either unmarried, Divorced or unhappily married. Even some of the friends who are happily married sometimes offer, at best, dishonest and, at worst, destructive pieces of advice. As women are, habitually, the most forthcoming regarding their marital problems, a few samplers of such homebreaking tips, usually picked up from weekend gym outings, salon prattle, lunch break tittle-tattle, market chatter etc, will suffice:
`Me? No man can do that to me and get away with it’. `Wake up, girlfriend, how can you suffer with any man? He is sure to drop you like a piece of hot yam the moment he comes into big money’. Oh really? some women, with their heads squarely screwed to their shoulders, promptly recover from the destructive influence of this evil counseling, others are not so gifted. Without turning it over in their minds a second time, they suck in every piece of advice. Of all the sorry passes a marriage can come to, the most painful is using sex as a weapon for any reason conceivable. Depending on what the aggrieved woman wants, sex oftentimes becomes a handy tool for vengeance, blackmail and punishment.
Why? To be sure, there is a very thin line between scarlet ladies - to whom sex means nothing else but pure commerce - and married women who, for any reason whatsoever, use sex to settle scores with their husbands!
Believe me, nothing binds, reassures, relaxes tension and engenders trust, in any marriage, like sexual intimacy. Where a couple fails to achieve this, the danger signals are so real, clear and present. In such a painful situation, I can only empathise with the man. Reason is: a wife who denies her husband sex - oblivious of her marital vows - completely strips his manhood of any meaning. And no man enjoys an affront on his manhood. Starve a man of food (which is bad enough) but give him a roll-over in bed and you literally prickhis robust ego with a pin. My plea to the womenfolk is this: whoever advises you to turn your back on your matrimonial bed – to get even with your husband in trying moments - is worse than an enemy. Sex is not a bargaining chip. If anything, it is a balm that you need to keep your marriage going when it is hurting. The more of sexual intimacy you have with your man, the more of him you have close by to hold, keep and cherish. To do the reverse is to willfully turn him out into the ever-waiting arms of those ogle-eyed care-givers, always on the prowl for unhappily married men.
Olawale Obadeyi is the C.E.O of Maximargins Communications
Limited (maximargins@gmail.com)